I've been on both Sky and BBC Scotland this morning talking about the fact that HM Revenue and Customs has today again published the names and photographs of people it said had cost taxpayers millions in lost revenue through tax evasion.
The first thing to note about this is how ineffective the campaign has been. Just one person has been arrested since the list was last published.
The second thing to note is that is pure diversionary tactics by HMRC. Just as their claim that they'e prosecuting more is being achieved by tackling easy cases, this list seeks to suggest that they know who tax evaders are when the vast majority of tax evasion relates to income or corporation tax and VAT on domestic trade and yet the prosecutions that almost all those pictured have committed relate to smuggling. That is not to say that tackling the organised crime associated with smuggling is not important; it clearly is. But to pretend that this is what most tax evasion is, as the HMRC campaign appears to imply, is absurd. It is not.
Most tax evasion is by people trading domestically. HMRC admit that about 50% of all self employed tax returns understate income. They know they lose over 10% of all VAT and yet deny this flows through to a loss of income or corporation tax on the suppressed revenues - which just cannot be true. If you lose tax on the sale you lose tax on the income generated by the sale. And hundreds of thousands of companies disappear each year - many owing tax, and nothing is done about it. The sums owing are not investigated. The half a million or more corporation tax returns not submitted each year are not pursued. Instead all corporation tax, income tax, VAT and NIC owing from these companies is just ignored.
For the government to claim it is stepping up its campaign on tax evasion when it is not backing Michael Meacher's UK Corporate and Individual Tax and Financial Transparency Bill is absurd. This would give HMRC the power needed to tackle this incredibly common form of tax abuse - much more common than smuggling. So, why won't it do it?
The answer is it is so frightened of the neoliberal business deregulation lobby they will do nothing to require companies comply with the law. And yet it is only with regulation imposed on all companies, and with all companies paying the tax that they owe, that a level playing field on which all business can compete equally will be created. In that case imposing the law fairly and even handedly on all, and making all pay their tax is a pro-business agenda. But it's not seen that way by a tax profession and a political culture that sees paying all tax as a bad thing.And as a result it is the right wing think tanks and those who yell about burdens on business who are undermining the chances of honest small businesses - the sort that generate jobs - in this country.
It's time we had a proper pro-business agenda in this country. It's called tax justice.
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Absolutely spot on Richard. As we well know, there’s no such thing as the ‘free market’. There’s nothing that says that less regulation is better. The right amount of regulation is the amount that produces the right outcomes.
I am afraid you do not get to say what constitutes a “pro Business agenda” in this Country any more than what would be a Pro Feminist agenda or even a Pro Farmer agenda.
It is for the Business groups and representatives to declare what their interests are and as none of them are in favour of the kind of higher / more aggressive taxation you outline here it is obviously not pro business.
Basically you just stating it is pro business does not make it pro business any more than Cameron declaring a tory policy pro Union makes it so!
Let us agree to differ
Largely because you’re clearly wrong
@Richard Murphy commenting on the other Richard
I agree the other Richard is wrong – in the same way that people who persist in unhealthy life-style choices, while protesting that “a little bit of what you fancy does no harm” are wrong, if the “little bit of what you fancy” is actually harming them.
Just because the business lobby is hooked on the ridiculous anti-business, but pro-MNC and 1% big business policies and practices that are paraded as being “good” for the economy, when they are only “good” for the few, doesn’t invalidate the utility of the sort of policies Richard M, and others (such as the New Economics Foundation) argue are pro-business.
The test is outcomes, and frankly the bollocks of the last 35 years of neo-liberalism has been ANYTHING but good for any business below the MNC level – look at our ravaged manufacturing base, our “ghost town” High Streets, as the New Economics Foundation called them, denuded of all character and localism and in thrall to coffee shops, a few supermarket giants, with Charity shops filling in the gaps. Where are our small speciality shops and corners shops and the like – the small businesses that employed locally and spent locally?
No, the current economic policy and what is held to be “common sense thinking” is ANYTHING but pro-business – it’s actually a scam designed to cream off unearned wealth by the tax-dodging fraternity.
Richard
“It is for the Business groups and representatives to declare what their interests are and as none of them are in favour of the kind of higher / more aggressive taxation you outline here it is obviously not pro business.”
I can’t add anything more of substance to Andrew’s comments. You mistake the “Big Business” agenda as put forward by the CBI as representing all business. The MNCs are forever seeking special treatment and advantages, ie corporate socialism, at the cost to the rest of us including national businesses small and large. The continued abuse of tax havens by MNCs is but one example of this.
In my experience there are a lot of business people who don’t cheat on tax.
There is a surprising degree of honesty. But this honesty has been reducing over the years because so many organizations/ people are seen as cheating the system.
HM Revenue & Customs is an organization not fit for purpose in my opinion.
But it has not been so for many years. It has been improved under the Coalition
(I don’t expect universal agreement here!)but that is only marginal from an appalling start.
Many of my fellow practitioners know this is the case but swim in a pool of apathy.
They don’t think they can change the system. I hope you can give them a nudge.
Stephen
I’m not sure I agree re one point – but there’s a fair amount of common ground there
Best
Richard